ALTHOUGH IT HAS BECOME an increasingly accepted assumption among scholars that the Victorian illustrated novel should be regarded as a special, mixed genre, in which the illustrations are essential to a full reading, the implications of this assumption have not really begun to be spelled out. So vast are the dimensions of the scholarly field that has opened up as a result of recent investigations of the background, sources, and functions of Victorian illustrations, that it is difficult to get one's bearings, to discern the principles which should govern our critical study of the relation between pictures and text. In regard to what are clearly the most important collaborations of the age, those between Dickens and Hablot K. Browne, his main illustrator, scholars have turned their attention to two subjects: the relation of Browne (and Dickens) to the traditions and techniques of English caricature, and the way the illustrations function to underline the novelist's themes. The first of these subjects is usually related to the problem of how the illustrations came to be there (as John R. Harvey has put it), along with some consideration of the development away from caricature in both Browne and Dickens;' and particular investigations of the illustrations' functions tend to lead to conclusions which are either rather fanciful or, if erring on the side of caution, rather slight. What we have lacked so far is any developed discussion of the aesthetics of the Dickens-Browne novel, including such questions as how the presence of the illustrations makes the reader's experience significantly different; what are the characteristic modes of integration of text and pictures; and how the various sources-which include not only caricature, but emblem books, mythology, and drama-drawn upon in these illustrations relate to the problem of integration. Another, much simpler way of putting the whole question is, what would be missing if the illustrations weren't there? In order to essay some tentative answers to these questions, I shall first consider some general problems (with specific examples) posed by Browne's illustrations, and then move to a discussion of a rich and complex instance of the complementarity of Dickens' and Browne's artistic visions.